On the Rest of Us
The following review also appears in Locust Review #6 (October 2021).
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Review: Richard Hamilton, Rest of Us (Recenter Press, 2021)God is bleeding, so ferry me across the Mississippi River — R.H. “Villanelle”
RUNNING THROUGHOUT Richard Hamilton’s Rest of Us is a concern with the emotional subjectivity of the individual as it relates to the broader social whole— capitalism, racism, and normativity; the sublated persistences of slavery; its “afterlife.”
Hamilton refers to this simultaneous concern as “discordant will,” similar to what Locust Review has called “differentiated totality” — the totality of the irreducible individual and the “social ensemble.” For Hamilton, the emotional being of the individual — as the Surrealists and AfroSurrealists argue — is inherently political.
In too much contemporary art and writing, we see a division of this whole. There are too many political artists who have internalized a bourgeois positivism. They see capitalist art expressing an empty “subjectivity” and assume subjective expression itself is capitalist. And, there are too many bourgeois artists who, having been told they are “special” upon their immaculate births, assume every one of their shits and farts are sculpture and poetry.
I recall Amiri Baraka’s 1962 poem, “The Politics of Rich Painters.”
Just their fingers’ prints staining the cold glass, is sufficient for commerce, and a proper ruling on humanity…
Baraka is not arguing against the idea of unique human expression. He is not denying the significance of fingerprints. He is questioning this individuality in artificial (and exploitative) separation from the rest of social existence. The fingers’ prints, without that reckoning, are empty gestures. Today, those fingers’ prints, without the necessary social reckoning, are often window dressing for gentrification and a weak avant-garde.
When Amiri Baraka fused the social and existential in his description of Emory Douglas’ work as “expressionist agit-prop” he was reconciling what had been artificially separated, and like Douglas [1], weaponizing that reconciliation against racism and capitalism.
Similarly, Hamilton’s discordant will weaponizes differentiated totality into a cacophony of revolutionary justice, a mountain falling down upon the oppressors; with a bearing and movement that denies capitalist realism and its reduced expectations.
Discordant will moves through the pages of Hamilton’s book — accusing, exposing, confessing, rebelling; from dozens of moments in history, among hundreds and thousands of persons whose subjectivity had been denied.
In doing so it begins to create what Hamilton calls a “panoramic production” — recalling the democratic impulse of the “epic” in Bertolt Brecht’s “Epic Theater.” Gut-punching emotional moments are crystallized in images and words, tumbling through both social catastrophe and resistance.
...Sir it is one hundred degrees in here and the air is obscene… — R.H., “Alabama Inmate Notes”A great leap forward for humankind, I am worrying the blues Jefferson helped ratify: a constitution. The cherry beat of civil forfeitures, if there ever was a tree, we hung from it… — R.H., “Black and White (Ode to the Haitian Revolution)”
Central in this is the excavation of history, or remixing of history, against false (and ultimately racist and capitalist) narratives of progress.
Do not covet salt or mercy, for it could not purify the darkening soil of enlightenment…— R.H., “Revolting Shadows”
Hamilton displaces false ideas of progress with a criticality that moves forward and backwards through time.
Do not forget that you belong to the first Black republic, gold reserves and crude misshapen diamonds. — R.H., “Revolting Shadows”
One strategy for remixing time is the palimpsest. A palimpsest is “a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain.”
In art and visual studies a “palimpsest” also refers to any surface bearing a multiplicity of partially remaining marks over time. For example, a wall along a train embankment holding traces of advertising posters, graffiti, bullet holes, and other accumulated but partial evidence of human life and performance.
Richard Hamilton. Author photograph by Timothy Devine, Recenter Press.
Think of a prisoner marking time on a jail cell wall with a piece of chalk. Now think of a hundred prisoners partially erasing and remaking those lines over months and years.
Despite making the art critic Ben Davis’ list of “30 Art-Writing Clichés to Ditch” in early 2015, the palimpsest is a profoundly important concept — particularly for artists and writers who believe in the radical democratic potential of human self-expression and its Gothic relationship to time. It is not simply the latest mark that is of note. It is all the marks — including the marks that will come in the future. And many of them have been — or will be — lost.
The palimpsest connects subjectivity, the marks made by individuals, with the social and the wider totality of relations.
In Richard Hamilton’s poem, “Palimpsest: Black Out,” we are given a layered record of time, with marked gaps — pieces that are missing. These gaps could almost be incomplete Mad Libs. But they are something far more.
The missing moments or words — like the enjambments [2] and unusual line breaks that appear through Rest of Us — create a musicality that alternates between arrhythmia and syncopation, echoing the rhythm of a seemingly post-industrial present with a decayed industrial past.
Similarly, in Hamilton’s poems there often isn’t just one volta. The voltas keep coming. [3]
It is necessary to employ “increasingly absurdist approaches,” Hamilton argues, to “outpace” the enemy.
If the “content” of the Rest of Us is that of a discordant will, so is its form. One moment the poems move into a witty didacticism — ”Martha with the Good Credit / Martha with the Bad Credit” — only to move in and out of experience, into musical disjointment and back into rhythm.
In “Decapitated Book Men (for Dutty Boukman),” [4] the second stanza recapitulates horror and subjugation, “Tempest winds rustle palmetto leaves / we enumerate: each sound a foot of lash our children.” The following stanza sketches the negation of the last: “We turn the master’s manor of red pincers / and rum into rude letters.”
The staccato of Hamilton’s “discordant will” escalates to “...mince the God who hoards the / grass to sow cane, unfit arms as means / for a turgid class.” All of this is opposed to the perversion of an Enlightenment that was often the opposite of what it claimed: “We carry the noble aims of Frenchmen — egalite and liberte to stead and slave, equally yoked for salvation.”
As Hamilton argues in the preface/artist statement for Rest of Us, a large part of his book is about the rippling impact of the Haitian Revolution through time and space. The “Black Jacobin’s needling lyre” (“Sunlight through the Wings / Black Jacobin Hummingbird”) repeatedly assaults the hagiography of the US “founding fathers” and genuflections before their racist, pro-slavery, landowner’s Constitution.
Likewise, Hamilton pivots off art and literature — from Richard Wright to Federico García Lorca — and the history of queer rebellion, the experience of traumas, the breaking and faltering of bodies. In “Bigger Rats,” he digresses or extrapolates from the opening of Native Son: “What if mother doesn’t want / to be saved but rather scurry.” A number of poems are reactions to the collage work of contemporary artist Ronald Williams.
The pathways of this discordant will — in remixed time — present a ferocious subjectivity. The “cramped palimpsest” of a slave ship’s hull carries the “future of four ghosted Black girls / holding precious / demands…” (“Black and White”)
It was always all here. The four girls — Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Carol Denise McNair — murdered in the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, are bound across time to the primordial origins of the racist colonial settler-state called the United States.
There are four great interwoven crimes that create capitalism — enclosure and the creation of the proletariat, industrializing chattel slavery, colonization/imperialism, and the subjugation of women and gender normativity. Not one of these is possible without racism. Not one of them is “over.” Not for working-class and poor people. Not one of them has stopped its ruthless destruction of life and being.
But the mountain will come crashing down in a wave of a billion voices, accusing, exposing, confessing, rebelling.
Hamilton’s book of brilliant poems is, in this sense, prophecy.
Endnotes
Emory Douglas was the Minister of Culture for the original Black Panther Party.
In poetry, an enjambment is a “run-over” in which a phrase passes from one line to another in an unusual manner.
A volta is a transition of emotion, image, theme, or bearing in a poem.
Dutty Boukman was an early leader in the Haitian Revolution.
Richard Hamilton was born in 1975 and grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey and Columbus, Georgia. A Cave Canem alumnus, his poetry has appeared in CONSEQUENCE magazine, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, Steel Toe Review, The Drunken Boat, and Cave Canem Anthologies edited by poets Cornelius Eady and Toi Derricotte. He is the recipient of fellowships from The Chatauqua Writers' Festival and The Vermont Studio Center. In 2020, he received the Oscar Williams and Gene Derwood Award. He holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Alabama and MA in Arts and Public Policy from New York University. He lives in Washington, D.C. Adam Turl was born in 1974 in upstate New York. They are an artist, writer, member of the Locust Collective, and co-organizer of the Born Again Labor Museum with Tish Turl. Turl has exhibited at the Brett Wesley Gallery and Cube Gallery (Las Vegas), Gallery 210 (St. Louis), Project 1612 (Peoria, Illinois), and Artspace 304 (Carbondale, Illinois). They earned their BFA from Southern Illinois University and their MFA from the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Art. Adam is also a co-host with Tish Turl of Locust Radio, produced by Drew Franzblau and Alexander Billet..